The Negro in American fiction

by Sterling A. Brown

In folk-idiom, the tales are kept close to the people. No author before Harris had recorded Negro speech with anything like his skill. Walter Hines Page stated: “I have Mr. Harris’ word for it that he can think in the Negro dialect. He could translate even Emerson, perhaps Bronson Alcott in it....” Any random excerpt will reveal this ability:

Bimeby, one day, after Brer Fox bin doin’ all dat he could fer ter ketch Brer Rabbit, en Brer Rabbit bin doin’ all he could fer to keep ’im fum it, Brer Fox say to hisse’f dat he’d put up a game on Brer Rabbit, en he ain’t mo’n got de wuds out’n his mouf twel Brer Rabbit come a lopin up de big road, lookin’ des ez plump en ez fat, en ez sassy ez a Moggin hoss in a barley patch....

“All right, Brer Fox, but you better holler fum whar you stan’. I’m monstus full er fleas dis mawnin’,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

Strewn through the stories is much local color, well-observed and true. Fine turns of speech reveal the slave’s mind. The use of Brer Rabbit as the hero is noteworthy. Forced to pit his cunning against enemies of greater physical strength, he was perhaps a symbol for people who needed craft in order to survive. But whether victor over Brer Wolf, or victim to the Tar-baby, he is a likeable scamp, who has come loping lickety-split down the years.

Before finishing his long cycle of tales, Uncle Remus revealed himself more thoroughly than any preceding Negro character. But Harris was a journalist, as well as a writer of fiction, and he was called upon to give his version of the critical times. It was here that his ability to translate anything into Negro dialect was misused. He made Uncle Remus the mouthpiece for defending orthodox southern attitudes. Needless to say, Uncle Remus diminishes in stature; he becomes less a man, more a walking delegate. The old man keeps his hat in his hand too much. He defends the glory of the Old South, he admires his white folks, he satirizes education for Negroes:

Hit’s de ruinashun er dis country.... Put a spellin’-book in a nigger’s han’s, en right den en dar’ you loozes a plow-hand.... What’s a nigger gwineter ’larn outen books? I kin take a bar’l stave an’ fling mo’ sense inter a nigger in one minnit dan all de schoolhouses betwixt dis en de State er Midgigin.... Wid one bar’l stave I kin fa’rly lif’ de vail er ignunce.

When Negroes migrated for better working conditions, or out of fear, Uncle Remus almost frantically begs them to “stay off them kyars.” That an old Negro, spoiled by his white-folks, and patronized by southern journalists, might say what his hearers want to hear, and even believe it, is quite probable. But as racial adviser, Uncle Remus forfeits our trust in him; he is too fluently the mouthpiece of southern policy. He did better telling how Brer Rabbit fooled Brer Fox by slick talk, or when he said: “Watch out we’en you’er gittin’ all you want. Fattenin’ hogs ain’t in luck.”

Many of Harris’s other stories repeat usual characters in usual situations. In “Aunt Fountain’s Prisoner” the old auntie saves a Yankee’s life and presides over his successful courtship of a southern girl. “Mingo” tells of a slave of “meritorious humility,” “a cut above” the Negroes who accepted freedom. In “Baalam and His Master,” Baalam, of a “fearlessness rare among slaves” fights alongside his roistering master in tavern brawls and digs a hole in the wall of a jail to be near him. Although Ananias is mean-looking, his sacrifice for his master, ruined by the war, proves him to be an old familiar, merely with a new face. Like the typical southern authors of his time, Harris does not show the Negro who would fight or work or exercise his wits in his own cause.

A few runaways and freed Negroes attracted his attention. Free Betsey in Sister Jane and Mink in On the Plantation are as devoted to their little missy and massa, however, as Uncle Remus. “Free Joe” is the pathetic story of a freed Negro, feared by the whites and avoided, but hardly envied, by the slaves. After his wife was sold by a master well nicknamed Old Spite, and his faithful little dog was killed by Old Spite’s hounds, he dies, heartbroken. Humane and intelligent, Harris uses “Free Joe” to attack the popular notion that Negroes always “grin at trouble.” The forces making a free Negro an outcast are clearly indicated. But dyed-in-the-wool southerners could use Joe’s shiftlessness to prove that a freed Negro could not stand alone, and Harris’s picture of the laughing, singing slaves who despised Free Joe might bear them out. Joe is certainly not a typical free Negro, but the sympathy in his portrait is deeper than any of Harris’s contemporaries dared show.

“Mom Bi” tells of an unusual mammy. In spite of her withered arm, Mom Bi is a black Amazon, with eyes that “shone like those of a wild animal not afraid of the hunter.” She was not religious: